This month, the Global Office has released some training material aimed at building and improving data producers’ knowledge and skills in agricultural statistics.In particular, this material is conceived for statisticians with an advanced training in statistics but with no specialization in agricultural statistics, and for professionals specialized in agriculture-related areas (e.g. economists or agronomists) with some training in statistics.

The material covers a broad range of topics, relevant to understand the scope of agricultural statistics and learn about the concepts, classifications, statistical units, data sources and methods to produce them. Moreover, trainees who benefit from or use this material will become able to:

understand the scope of agricultural statistics, concepts and classifications;

identify the main agricultural statistics to be produced for decision-making;

define statistical units in relation to the topics studied;

list the sources of agricultural data, and identify the data collected from agricultural censuses and main sample surveys;

describe the methods used to collect agricultural data, in particular, the ones related to new technologies (GPS, Smartphones, tablets, etc.);

understand the problems that arise during the processing, analysis and dissemination of agricultural data and ways to overcome them;

describe the main analytical frameworks and the derived statistics using agricultural data.

A set of Powerpoint presentations, summarizing the content of the training manual;

An exercise book with solutions (available upon trainers’ request).

The English version will be accessible by the end of 2017.

The dissemination of this material is a result of long-standing efforts. The Global Office would like to thank Ankouvi Nayo and Tiral Sidi, the main authors of the documents, as well as several people who contributed to its development, review and dissemination.

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The Global Office of the Global Strategy to improve agricultural and rural statistics (GSARS) is hosted by the FAO’s Statistics Division (ESS) in Rome.